The elaborate plan to bring al-Saadi Gadhafi to Mexico also allegedly involved two Mexicans and a Danish suspect, Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire said.

Al-Saadi Gadhafi never made it to Mexico, but did reach the Western African country of Niger, where he has been living.

By:Star wire services, Published on Wed Dec 07 2011

MEXICO CITY—Mexico said Wednesday it had broken up an international plot led by a Canadian woman to smuggle a son of late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his family into Mexico under false names and with false Mexican documents.

The elaborate plan to bring al-Saadi Gadhafi, 38, to Mexico also allegedly involved two Mexicans and a Dane, Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire said.

Poire said the country had detected the plot on Sept. 6 and made arrests on Nov. 10 and 11, calling in law enforcement to break up the conspiracy known as “Operation Guest.”

Poire said the leader of the plot was Canadian Cynthia Vanier, head of Vanier Consulting Ltd., a Mount Forest, Ontario-based mediation company.

A woman who answered the phone at Vanier Consulting would not give her name, and did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

The Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed Vanier’s arrest and said officials in Ottawa and Mexico City are “providing consular assistance as required.”

Vanier worked with Attawapiskat First Nation in the fall of 2009, according to her website.

Her resume also cites work with various other aboriginal groups, including Caledonia’s Six Nations of the Grand River from 2006 to 2007. She also claims to have assisted in the Ipperwash Provincial Park standoff in 1995.

Her resume online states she is also trained in other areas including “kidnap, ransom negotiation and asset recovery facilitation.”

Her international work includes working as a fact-finder for an architectural dispute concerning the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and “anti-terrorism, fraud, and other high risk facilitation and negotiations,” the resume states.

Poire said Vanier was detained Nov. 10 and is being held, along with the three other suspects, under a form of house arrest on suspicion of falsifying documents.

Vanier “was the direct contact with the Gadhafi family and the leader of the group, and presumably was the person in charge of the finances of the operation,” said Poire.

The plot was uncovered in early September as al-Saadi, Gadhafi’s third son, was fleeing Libya shortly after his father’s ouster. He never made it to Mexico, but did reach the Western African country of Niger, where he has been living.

The plotters allegedly jetted into Mexico, opened bank accounts and bought properties meant to be used as safe houses in several parts of the country, including one in Punta Mita, a ritzy development sometimes frequented stars such as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen, near Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Poire said the plan called for contracting private flights in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Kosovo and several Mideast countries.

“The large economic resources which this criminal organization has, or had, allowed them to contract private flights,” Poire told a news conference. Given the United Nations had frozen the family’s assets, it’s unclear where the money came from.

The plot also allegedly involved a Mexican woman who lived in the United States, who Poire said served as the liaison to obtain the falsified Mexican identity documents.

A Danish man alleged served as “the logistic liaison” for the plan, Poire said.

“The activities of the criminal organization in our country included the falsification of official documents, the opening of bank accounts with false documents, the purchase of real estate that were intended, among other things, to serve as a residence for the Gadhafi family at a house located in the zone of the Bahia de Banderas,” just north of the resort of Puerto Vallarta.

Gary Peters, director of Ontario-based Can/Aust Security & Investigations International Inc., said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press that he had worked as al-Saadi’s North America security chief for several years and confirmed that Gadhafi had planned to travel to Mexico because “he was interested in buying property there in Punta Mita.”

Al-Saadi had never been there before and probably read about it in a magazine, Peters said. “It’s a pretty well-known place. It’s a high-falutin’ place.”

Peters said he knew Vanier and said her role was to get travel documents for Gahdafi’s son, but he said the arrangements were legitimate, as far as he knew.

“It wasn’t smuggling. I don’t understand how they’re saying it was smuggling,” he said.

The plan, Peters said, was to “help him get there on humanitarian rights.” Asked if that meant he might have intended to file an asylum claim, Peters said: “I can’t really comment on it at the moment. Cindy’s in jail now so I don’t know what’s going on down there.”

“I don’t know where these documents were coming from; that was all Cindy’s area. I was just doing security,” Peters said.

“As far as I knew, the contacts that she was talking to, they weren’t going to be false, they were going to be legitimate documents.”

But he added he didn’t know whether al-Saadi’s name would appear on the passports. “I don’t know whose name, I don’t know, that wasn’t my area.”

Poire said the false travel documents were issued in the names of “Daniel Bejar Hanan, Amira Sayed Nader, Moah Bejar Sayed and Sofia Bejar Sayed.” The Gadhafi name did not appear on any of the documents.

Peters said the plan for al-Saadi to travel to Mexico is now off, noting “that’s not going to happen, obviously.”

The Mexican officials made no mention of Moammar Gadhafi himself being involved in the plan. He was ousted from power in late August and was captured and killed in Libya on Oct. 20.

Of Gadhafi’s seven other children besides al-Saadi, three were killed and one was captured during the conflict, and three fled to neighboring Algeria in August.